About Us
By supporting team-based learning with coding projects, we help teachers inspire the next billion programmers in classrooms around the world
STaBL Foundation is a Canadian registered charity whose purpose is “To advance education by providing tools, curricula, and training in computer science and team-based innovation to children and teachers across Canada and around the world, especially those who are underrepresented in post-secondary computer science and software engineering programs" Our name comes from our long-term roadmap for leveraging advanced technologies to serve teachers:
Scalable..
An Integrated Development Environment provides professional software developers access to powerful tools for managing complexity. Children deserve the same, and we are building tools for children which will make professionals jealous.
A Projectional Editor eliminates the dreaded syntax error (and type errors too) which will free up mentor time to help with higher-level logical and logistical issues. When teachers saw ElmJr for iPad, they said “Now even I can learn coding.” We will use the lessons we learned from the ElmJr prototype to create a projectional editor integrated into our web platform.
Machine Learning is tremendously useful, but it is a long way from the human-like intelligence needed to replace teachers. Rather than trying to replace the teacher, our use of analytics and machine learning will be like giving teachers x-ray vision. Teachers have struggled to teach in virtual classrooms because they are deprived of the contextual clues which give them a sense of the class. Our analytics will provide a depth of contextual information letting teachers feel more in-touch with their class than if they were sitting in front of them.
..Team-Based..
Scaffolding is about creating the conditions where children can learn. Give them tasks slightly beyond their current ability, but give them support: cognitive scaffolding to ensure they have prerequisite knowledge and skills, affective scaffolding to ensure that they have the confidence to attempt it, strategic scaffolding to ensure that they have a framework to organize their work, especially when working on complex team projects, and technical scaffolding to inform the design of both curriculum and tools.
Social-Emotional Learning is about giving children skills to build relationships, think critically and creatively, manage emotions and overcome adversity. It is a key part of both individual and team success. With our tools, children can collaborate across the aisle or across the world, and develop those skills with the support of mentors and teachers.
..Learning
Algebraic Thinking is teaching programming as if we wanted every child to succeed in high-school algebra and have access to STEM education pathways. Our graphics library introduces algebraic concepts to them in the context of creating pictures and animations. They learn problem decomposition by literally decomposing shapes. They use variables exactly as they will use variables in algebra. And they become comfortable using and defining their own functions, which–by design–work just like mathematical functions.
Design Thinking is a method for creative problem solving which puts into practice research on Design Science. Children love to build things, but they can accomplish more scaffolded by this framework. We use Design Thinking in our own curriculum and tool development, why wouldn’t we build it into our curriculum? In the future, it will be integrated into the IDE as well.
Model Driven Development was invented by engineers developing safety-critical systems controlled by software. They wanted the mathematical structures they used to document and reason about their systems to be mirrored automatically in their source code. Why do we teach children to program without explaining the underlying mathematical structures? We are developing an MDD system based on State Diagrams to fix that. McMaster Start Coding is already using a prototype tool in Adventure Game camps.